David Bowie and The Swedish Academy

“I want eagles in my daydreams, diamonds in my eyes”

Brooklyn based Hyperallergic have published an article by Jan Åman, a respected curator, writer, columnist, based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Titled David Bowie, the Nobel Prize, and Panic in Stockholm, the piece centres on the current drama around the Swedish Academy, which “has reached Shakespearian proportions, and might even flip the way we look at contemporary culture.”.

The Swedish Academy is the institution that has selected the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1901. But, as Åman highlights, the recent troubles have seen the present members (who are appointed for life), reduced from 18 to 10. (Currently back up to 14.)

Here’s a heavily edited excerpt, wherein Åman mentions Bowie in the company of cultural icons that Bowie himself would have been far too humble and embarrassed to see highlighted:

+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +

Not many people noticed it, but right after Bob Dylan became the 2016 Nobel Prize laureate, the (until recently) Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, was asked her personal opinion on Dylan. She answered, almost en-passant, that she was more of a Bowie fan, thereby slipping us a key.

Bob Dylan had for ages been mentioned as a possible Nobel Prize winner. But Bowie — that was a different twist. What I realized then and there was that the spirit of David Bowie has hovered over the way she has been staging her job ever since she became the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

When, in 2015, Danius made her debut in the job, she descended the staircase to the Nobel Dinner in the Blue Hall as if it were a truly historical world stage. She was wearing a gown designed by Pär Engsheden in close cooperation with Danius herself, a dress well beyond normal contemporary standards. .

Her way of heading the Academy can very well be compared to David Bowie’s entry into London’s world of rock’n’roll in the 1970’s. Bowie sensed his own greatness and was able to cope with it, as many great artists do, by surpassing his context.

David Bowie was the opposite of your ordinary rock star. He invented a series of alter egos to distance himself from a market that would swallow the identities of many other, less savvy musicians. He turned himself into Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, personas that enabled him to play with pop culture’s soon-to-implode future. He handled the leap across the Atlantic to the US by turning himself into The Thin White Duke — and kept on changing even after his death (”dropped my cell-phone down below…”).

David Bowie is in this sense a descendant of Marcel Duchamp, who, through Rrose Selavy, could play with both gender and life. Marcel Duchamp too felt a need to surpass his context, the art world of Paris. When, late in life, Duchamp was asked by professor Ulf Linde why he moved to New York in 1915, he replied: “The art life in Paris had already turned into the market’s need for Braque and Picasso — and I didn’t want play on such a low level.”

The photographs taken by Carl Bengtsson of Sara Danius in Engsheden’s gowns are related to the shape-shifting images of Bowie and Duchamp: They make her into an actor. She and the Academy are decidedly not the same. They are different entities, coming from different worlds.

Compare Danius’s gestures with the demeanor of Horace Engdahl, a previous Permanent Secretary, who is rumored to be her leading opponent in the Academy turmoil. In photographs taken outside the Academy building at the height of the scandal, he is seen laughing at journalists as if he embodied and personified the entire institution. He laughs as if he were the Academy laughing.

Conincidentally, Engdahl’s writing has largely focused on German Romantic poets. The Thin White Duke and Rrose Selavy are thus pitted against the doomed poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Externalizing against internalizing. A distanced persona against a self blurred with its context.

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) lost his mental health and lived the last 36 years of his life in the house of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer, out of touch with the external world. Is this the destiny awaiting the Academy? Or will the furor be an opportunity for reinvention, for multiple roles in a rapidly expanding cultural universe?

As work of contemporary art, the Academy scandal has a potential to disrupt an old institution, as well as old models of cultural production, as they turn and face the strange — ch-ch-changes.